


an antique mystery

by pajama_sama



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Angst, Existential Angst, F/M, Fluff, General, Romance, bunch of jackasses standing in a circle, who wouldn't have a crisis after actually talking to the POE gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-11-04 13:09:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20731427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pajama_sama/pseuds/pajama_sama
Summary: Daenna reflects on what her journeys in the Deadfire so far have taught her—and how meeting one particular person has changed her.





	an antique mystery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Denerim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Denerim/gifts).

> i don't own this beautiful blue mooncake—she's a best friend's character and canon Watcher—i just borrowed her to write about her!! check out more about Daenna and her other lovely ocs at her tumblr, @bleden-mark. ♥

FAREWELL, FAREWELL, MY OWN TRUE LOVE

THIS PARTING GIVES ME PAIN…

  
  


* * *

  


There was a time when Daenna loved nothing more than a good story.   
  
Even the bitterest of tragedies, after all, have something to offer. A lesson. A catharsis. Some kind of conclusion. Or, rather—had.  
  
Song and scripture have lost their luster since her days in the Dyrwood. Perhaps Woedica’s sneering is to blame. Or Thaos’ scheming. A combination of both, most likely. It was not easy, looking beneath the veneer of legend and seeing nothing but rot and lies. She’d watched quietly as the foundations to her childhood faith and love crumbled like embers to ash, and then from ash to dust, just to be borne away by the sour winds of truth. None of it has returned to her, not really.   
  
She finds some momentary contentment in a tune or a verse, but it never lasts long. She knows the stories behind the stories, now—the reason why she looks the way she does, why her soul is the way that it is. Mirrors aren’t much of a friend to her anymore, either. It’s like Berath’s simple explanation of the godlike existence has taken the place of her face: peering into a looking glass reminds her only of those words, of Ondra’s preening confirmation. _Of course_, she’d said, staring down at Daenna with those beady, glassy globes of eyes. _Should we ever need to, you and all your kin could be our vessels. Did you believe differently?_  
  
Daenna has had a hard time loving the blue of her skin (or the starry freckles across her back and nose) recently. The curl of her turquoise hair and the glow of her moon-crown are much the same—they aren’t hers. They’re Ondra's marks, a possession made manifest. Everything she is or ever was could be snuffed out by the tiniest grasp of Ondra’s will, erased to make room for a conceited construct of untruths and Engwithan narcissism.  
  
So much for _N’gati's blessing. _Ondra’s attention is as much a blessing as a hammer to the foot. Pallegina had been right all along.  
  
Daenna remembers the image she’d had of lunar divinity not so long ago—a gauzy dream of mysticism and prophecy, overseen by a lovelorn moon goddess that served as a mother to all those seeking the succor of the sea. That thought is utter comedy now; Ondra is the concept some ancient mage had of godhood brought to life—a colossal angler with pendulous breasts and the attitude of a jilted noblewoman. She shrieks and sighs and gloats like a schoolyard bully, and thinks that bringing an entire moon down onto Eora to stop her wayward brother—a plan with limited, if not _nonexistent_ odds of success—a completely logical escalation of events.   
  
There is nothing heavenly about a mean-spirited fish. Daenna sees them every day she and her crew are at sea. 

  
  


* * *

  


Tekehu is always careful with her.  
  
Not in the sense that he holds back, or is overly cautious—but he is considerate, and gentle, and kind. And he does not mind any of her idiosyncrasies, her reservations, or her inexperiences. She could honestly sit around most of the day listing the things she adores most about him, but it would never end, and she could better spend the time by using it to show him how much he's come to mean to her.  
  
One night they are tangled amidst the sheets on her bed in the captain's cabin, wearing nothing and talking in low voices over the steady thrum of the arcane lanterns; their luminescence is everywhere, turning the cabin into an ethereal landscape of inky shadows and shimmering sapphire light.   
  
Tekehu’s skin is magnificent under normal circumstances—an intricate patchwork of ocean-bright colors, from cerulean to aquamarine to silver to infinitesimal flecks of seashell pink—but by the glow of the lanterns, he is nothing short of resplendent. He’s been lying on his back for a while now, anemone hair tossed over her pillows, letting her lean on him and stroke at his face and clavicle as she wishes. His palms are still clasped around her upper arms, cool to the touch, fingers brushing circles into her shoulders in a soothing rhythm.   
  
She’s tracing the stripes of teal along his neck when he laughs a little, interrupting the lull in their conversation.   
  
“See something amusing?” Daenna asks, raising a brow. Tekehu just cards a hand through her hair, letting it roll silkily off his knuckles.  
  
“Only that if you keep staring so, my love, you are wont to get stuck,” he remarks.  
  
She flicks at his nose gently. “You’d like that, wouldn't you?”  
  
His hands slip down her bare back, ghosting under the sheet for a moment. “Hm. Perhaps. I will admit to nothing. But you would be just as enchanting rooted to a single spot as you are when you're free to dance and sing, I say.”  
  
“My,” she sighs, feeling a pleasant buzz at his praise, “such flattery.”  
  
Tekehu hums. “No. Simply the truth.”  
  
Her heart wells with an unstoppable tide of affection for him. It’s so overwhelming and sudden that she’s compelled to just embrace him, pressing her cheek to his chest and listening to the thud of his own heart, a part of him that logic dictates is physically separate, but that she believes lives within her as well. She can smell the salty-sweet, summer evening tang of his skin, the scent of them together. She’ll hit the next person who says he reeks of fish, and hit them hard. Nothing could be further from reality.  
  
Daenna can tell he's surprised—he tensed for a moment beneath her, when she moved. He is used to his compliments being collected or dismissed, or even accepted with the ease of someone who is entirely too confident about themselves. Her Tekehu is very well versed in the art of appreciating beauty without expecting anything more, in trading words like coin. She used to believe what she was told with a guileless surety that died in the Dyrwood, blown away like smoke in the wind. He makes her feel like she could begin to believe again, if only in the little things: that she can still be beautiful, that the gods still cannot choose who she can love, that hope and art still have a place in her world, and that stories still have meaning.   
  
That, above all, makes her adore him more than anything else. She wishes she could tell him, but her mastery of speech is useless in his presence—she cannot begin to explain what he inspires in her. Sadly, she must settle for something less earth-shattering.  
  
“You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, _aimoro,” _she murmurs into the sweep of his clavicle. "You know this, yes?"  
  
His arms circle around her, and he presses a soft kiss to the crown of her head, breathing deep. “I feel the same,” he admits quietly.   
  
She thinks of the time the defenses of her mind were cleaved open by the prying rake of Ondra’s consciousness—of the cold, suffocating sensation of being fathoms beneath the surface when she was simply standing on deck. She knows what it is to die to the crushing pressure of freezing water, now, because Ondra made sure that she would; she knows the blind terror of a creature floundering in the abyss, the last psychic horror of realizing it will never again see the light or breathe air—that this is the end of ends. The final ordeal.   
  
Daenna had fancied herself a child of the sea, before Ondra—that she was as changeable and sweet and sometimes cruel as the seething tides. She’d been wrong.   
  
A lifetime of disappointed faces and silent, disapproving matriarchs had sprung to the forefront at the dismissal of a goddess. _I want better for him than you_, was all she’d been told. It’d cut deeper than any blade.  
  
_(I want. _Always personally concerned. Always ‘I,’ not ‘we’ or ‘he.’)  
  
She settles further into the comfort of Tekehu’s arms, brushing an absentminded kiss to his jaw and hearing the answering chuckle. He’s ticklish—though he would never say so.   
  
_(Better for him. _Is it a contest? Is love some strange tally-keeping game?)  
  
It is true that Daenna is no longer as fond of stories as she used to be, and she can’t quite decide what she believes in any longer; it is true that Tekehu could have chosen someone more virtuous, more pious; and it is true that she is not the best there is to offer.   
  
(_Than you. _She is finished letting the gods define her worth. The world’s worth.)  
  
But she does know one thing: together, they are definitely better than anything Ondra ever gave him. 

  
  


* * *

  


“Permission to speak freely, _casità?”_  
  
The question comes from a deckhand they'd taken on in the early days of Port Maje—a Vailian girl named Adia, with eyes as dark and clear as a doe’s and skin like teak; she’s quick with her hands and eager to prove herself. Her intelligence shines through in conversation. When they speak, it almost feels like they’re friends. Daenna sees something familiar in her. Maybe that’s why the indulgement happens at all.   
  
Daenna gives her a nod, turning to watch as the rest of the crew disembarks, filing down the gangplank. They’ve been looking forward to shore leave for weeks now—she expects she won't hear from many of them for some days.  
  
“_Agracima_! I hope I don't sound too forward, for my question is a little personal, but I was wondering—were you named for Daenna, from _The Poet And A Storm? _It is one of my favorite plays…”  
  
She casts a glance at Adia, standing there to the side with an expectant expression, nut-brown curls fluttering in the salty breeze: looking a woman, but still a child at heart. Hopeful. In the summer of her youth.  
  
“No,” she says, and Adia’s shoulders actually slump. “Daenna is a derivative of Devena—my maternal grandmother's name. My parents thought to honor her.”  
  
It is too bad that her namesake is none too fond of people unable to continue the family line, or artists, or adventurers, or those who chase _anything_ worth experiencing, really.   
  
The esteemed lady Devena had judged and sentenced Daenna while she was yet in her mother's swaddle, just a blue babe with eyes glued shut and a voice that could shake the world. A whole fate had been imagined for her simply because of the circumstance of her birth. The older she gets, the more trouble she has distinguishing the cold regard of the d’Acosti matriarch from Ondra’s coral-sharp scorn. They are the same thing coming from the same place, in essence, once you dispense with the illusion of godliness—the seeping turmoil of mothers who should not have been mothers, casting long shadows over their children’s lives.  
  
“Ah, well,” Adia sighs. “It is a beautiful name.”  
  
If only it still made her feel that way.   
  
“Thank you,” Daenna says, because manners are a lady’s best asset, and she has them in spades. Her mother raised her well.  
  
Her eyes wander across the dock beyond the gangplank, settling on welcome and familiar sight.   
  
Tekehu is stood by one of the dock’s many rope-wrapped pilings, regaling Edér with a ridiculous escapade, no doubt, punctuating his narration here and there with expressive gesticulations. The sun glitters in his hair and on his shoulders, on the seashells hanging in beaded lines from the waist of his watershaper’s robe. She cannot hear what they are saying, but Edér’s humor is mirrored in the expression on Tekehu’s face—it’s one of her favorites, actually, something between a smile and an excited grin that shows off his splendid, sharp teeth. It appears when he’s caught up in the thread of a tale he finds particularly entertaining; or it heralds the imminent success of some elaborate, long-anticipated mischief. That uncomplicated joy is so precious to her.   
  
“Do you like stories, _casità_?”  
  
She’d forgotten Adia was even there. Daenna looks back at the deckhand, grasping for an answer that won’t betray the morbid turn her thoughts have taken lately.   
  
“They’re alright,” she finally responds. “It depends on the story.”  
  
Adia comes to join her at the railing surrounding the bridge, keeping a respectful distance. There’s a moment of silence as the deckhand gazes out over the bustling port of Queen’s Berth, her features composed and calm. Daenna wonders how she sees it, what things stand out to her; what the world looks like to someone untouched by the direct meddling of the gods. Is it different? Wilder? More approachable? Boring? She’ll never find out.   
  
“I think they’re very important,” Adia murmurs, her voice barely louder than the rushing hiss of the water against the dockside. “They let us speak the words we are too afraid to say. They are the poor man’s tutor and the child’s nightly comfort. And they give us hope.”  
  
“_Ac_. But too much hope can be a poison, and not every solution is simple,” Daenna says. Her heart thuds hard in her chest. “Sometimes the story is nothing more than just that: a story.”  
  
“Why tell them at all, then?”  
  
“To comfort ourselves, I suppose. To give greater meaning where there is none.”  
  
“No doubt. However, is not the search for a purpose, a purpose in itself?” Adia hesitates, for an instant. “Maybe we do not need a true greater meaning. Maybe just looking for it is significant enough.”  
  
Daenna shakes her head. “What are you doing on this ship, _sérre? _You should be in an academy—not scrubbing seabird leavings from wood.”  
  
“Well, _that_ is a story of its own,” Adia says with a quirk of her brows. “Alas—recounting it now would take too long. And, with all due respect, I think someone is waiting for you.”  
  
It is true. When Daenna turns her attention back to the dock, she notices that Edér is gone, and Tekehu is by the gangplank, his eyes trained on her. He smiles widely at the sight of her looking, raising an arm in a short wave. He used to be the first to disappear when they would dock at Neketaka, leaving to seek diversion alone, but that has changed. He’s changed _everything_. She can’t imagine being without him now—it would be like missing a limb, and she likes those to be in their place and functioning properly.   
  
“We will finish this later,” Daenna promises Adia. “I will have every detail from you.”  
  
“Of course, _casità.” _Adia nods at her… and then gives her a wink, so quick Daenna almost misses it. “_Ado vidòrio, _Watcher.”  
  
For the first time this week, Daenna laughs. 

  
  


* * *

  


I’LL BE YOUR OWN TRUE GUIDING LIGHT

WHEN I RETURN AGAIN.


End file.
